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This command takes a snapshot of the open files for a PID 1234 then waits 10 seconds and takes another snapshot of the same PID, it then displays the difference between each snapshot to give you an insight into what the application is doing.

Just after you type enter, you have 3 seconds to switch window, then "texthere" will be "typed" in the X11 application that has focus. Very useful to beat your score at games such as "How fast can you type A-Z".

This command will play back each keystroke in a session log recorded using the script command. You'll need to replace the ^[ ^G and ^M characters with CTRL-[, CTRL-G and CTRL-M. To do this you need to press CTRL-V CTRL-[ or CTRL-V CTRL-G or CTRL-V CTRL-M.

You can adjust the playback typing speed by modifying the sleep.

If you're not bothered about seeing each keypress then you could just use:

This is a more accurate way to watch the progress of a dd process. The $DDPID=$! is needed so that you don't get the PID of the sleep. The sleep 1 is needed because in my testing at least, if you run kill -USR1 against dd too quickly, it will kill it off instead of display the status. So you need to wait a second, probably so that it can configure itself to trap the USR1 signal.

If the remote doesn't export its desktop (eg fluxbox, blackbox etc) then you need to run a x11vnc server there and a vncviewer at the local end. This command does the lot for you - it assumes that you can 'ssh' to the box without a password and that x11vnc is installed at the remote end.

My example work for 1280x800 display, been 1280 the number of interest.

Tweak the number, try a biiiig one and see your cube spinning...

I put a complex example to show how fun things can be, even for my ademco and paradox alarm central network advisor interface xpto etc. It rotates two faces, print the alarm message, and goes back tho where it was.

Check out the usage of 'trap', you may not have seen this one much. This command provides a way to schedule commands at certain times by running them after sleep finishes sleeping. In the example 'sleep 2h' sleeps for 2 hours. What is cool about this command is that it uses the 'trap' builtin bash command to remove the SIGHUP trap that normally exits all processes started by the shell upon logout. The 'trap 1' command then restores the normal SIGHUP behaviour.

It also uses the 'nice -n 19' command which causes the sleep process to be run with minimal CPU.

Further, it runs all the commands within the 2nd parentheses in the background. This is sweet cuz you can fire off as many of these as you want. Very helpful for shell scripts.

Very useful for interactive scripts where you would like to return the terminal contents to its original state before the script was run. This would be similar to how vi exits and returns you to your original terminal screen.